This page provides online resources to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always welcome!

Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)

What's Up on the Web:

A fortnightly update on items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia and East Timor and accessible through links on this page.

# 13 - Simplicity, take two

In the spring (see #1, posted April 26) I did a very brief post about Simplicity, a blog "designed to augment your research through use of the net." Since then, this blog has been evolving, and so I thought today I would do a follow-up about it as a resource tool.

On the left and right sidebars, the links are arranged in groups, sometimes related to the medium (e.g., searchrolls plus, radio stations, lists, blogs, video, and mashups, etc.), sometimes to content (e.g., Southeast Asia, language, and minority groups, etc.). Sandwiched in the center of the blog between the left and right sidebars are a series of essays and comments about the resources. These (mostly) short posts are coded as "An Introduction" and "Wondrous Things" under Categories on the right, beneath Archives. Click first on "An Introduction" and then on "Wondrous Things" and then scroll down the page to read these posts in the order they appeared.  In addition to the early posts (with headings such as "searchrolls," "listibles," "swickis," "clusters," and more), key ones include "Simplicity, a great place to do research" posted on March 25 of this year and "Shifting Sidebars" #1 through #18 posted between March 26 and June 25.  Taken together, these posts describe the net resources, how they were selected, and how to use them. (If you don't have the time or inclination to read all this, you can just search (using the 'find' function under 'edit') for what you already know you want.)

What Simplicity does, I think, is twofold: on the one hand, it makes the net familiar and accessible to ordinary, non-technological people. On the other hand, and I think equally importantly, it explores how the net is being created, how it works, how different groups and individuals use it.  This helps us talk about the who-what-why-where-and-when of online sources the way we are  already accustomed to do with print sources but haven't yet done with the web.

In future columns, I plan to explore some examples of experiments with the participatory web created by students of Indonesia and Timor Leste. Stay tuned....

This just came in:

INTRODUCING 'INDOPEDIA'
"Indopedia" is a type of Wikipedia specifically devoted to Indonesian Studies.  It is located at http://editthis.info/indopedia/Main_Page  It's meant to help scholars and researchers minimize reinventing the wheel, especially for graduate students doing fieldwork. It was created by Ph.D. student Jenny Epley from the University of Michigan - jepley@umich.edu

 Posted on Nov 3, 2006